Smut-peddling hackers pwn TechCrunch

Popular technology site TechCrunch was hit by potty-mouth hackers late on Monday, leaving the site temporarily unavailable. A notice on TechCrunch.com's front page on Tuesday morning explains that "TechCrunch.com was compromised by a security exploit". Access to the site's story archive has been suspended leaving a two para …

[Rob Moir]

popular my foot

Couldn't happen to a bigger bunch of jerks.

[DZ-Jay]

Re: popular my foot

@Rob Moir:

You mean, it couldn't happen to El Reg?

I jest, sorry. I love The Register.

Don't taze me, bro.

-dZ.

[Anonymous Coward]

ah, techcrunch

Techcrunch are a little too pally with the tech 'startup' community for my liking. I think it skews their reporting a little bit.

So for me; meh if it means that people find their news from another source, so much the better IMO.

anon becuase, well just because.

[Anonymous Coward]

"tech site" my foot also

It's a cringe inducing 2.0-fest for Nathan Barleys. The technical insight is on a par with Rory Cellan-Jones or similar.

[Etrien Dautre]

title

the pic of the deface in the link "here" in the article on twitpic screenshot, look at the address string of the browser... and search string, too (-:

[SavioLau]

Lucky there was no malware

Since the hackers were able to modify TechCrunch's front page, they could have modified the page to link to or embed any code they wish to. As my colleague Graham Cluley has noted, it's lucky that there are no malware on the site.

Imagine the impact if, on Apple's product launch day tomorrow, the hackers embed something like the Gumblar on the site, which happens to be very popular these days:

http://www.sophos.com/blogs/sophoslabs/post/8338

or, a Javascript that launches yet another version of Rogue Antivirus.

Furthermore, with the recent Adobe/Microsoft, etc. vulnerabilities, it's quite possible that many computers have yet to be updated. A multi-exploit malware embedded in the site would have cause much grief.

The end result could get very messy. So TechCrunch readers probably have dodged a bullet here.

Savio Lau, SophosLabs Canada